“Oh, this isn’t cool.”
Those are the words I uttered when the beginning-of-episode recap came and went this week with neither a glimpse nor even a mention of the sexy T-1000 who made such a memorable appearance in the final moments of the season premiere. And I can’t imagine I’m the only one. When Shirley Manson transformed from a urinal into a liquid-metal killing machine last week, it was – to paraphrase David Medsker – a moment of the “hell, yes” variety, and to follow that up with an episode which mostly acts like it never happened…?
Frankly, it verges on the unforgivable.
So yet another guy from the future comes back to send a message to the Connor clan, barely surviving long enough to spit out his message that they should go to their friendly neighborhood nuclear power plant. We get a brief flash-forward…we’re talking about five seconds long…so that we can get an idea of the importance of this plant, but while glimpses of the future always look awesome, you can’t help but look at the brief scenes and think, “Well, that was nice. Too bad they probably blew 95% of this week’s special-effects budget on that sequence.” In this case, it was apparently more like 99%, since the FX otherwise remain at a bare minimum this week…but I digress. Sarah and Cameron quickly get jobs at the plant, with Sarah almost managing to act more suspicious than Cameron in her attempts to ingratiate herself to the boss man, Carl. (It’s bad enough when she does it in the office, but when she turns up at the local watering hole, it’s even worse.)
John’s freak-out at the end of last episode apparently wasn’t as profound as it might’ve looked from his haircut, but he’s clearly still a changed (young) man. Although it was done a little heavy-handedly, his return to school made a very good point: how do you just go through the motions when you already know what the future holds? With the help of a new female friend, apparently. It’s funny that Busy Phillips should play the very pregnant realtor who shows Sarah Connor their new digs, since even before she made her appearance, I was already thinking that Riley (Leven Rambin), totally reminded me of Kim Kelly in “Freaks and Geeks.” At the moment, though, there’s not much to the character of Riley, aside from the fact that she’s kind of cute and she clearly thinks John is, too.
There was an ungodly amount of conversation in this episode, much of it stupefying in its banality. The worst offenders were the conversations between Sarah and Carl, of course, though the drivel being spouted between John and Riley wasn’t much better. The scenes with Agent Ellison and Charley Dixon were interesting in a let’s-get-all-the-loose-ends-from-last-season-wrapped-up kind of way, but they weren’t overly satisfying, mostly because Charley was a great character. I’m sure we’ll see him return, because I refuse to believe that he won’t eventually kick his wife to the curb in favor of Sarah, but it was a shame to see him go nonetheless.
This may well have been the most boring episode of “The Sarah Connor Chronicles” to date, and after the success of last week’s season premiere (granted, I liked it better than David did, but, still, even he admitted that there was plenty of action to be had), it could prove to be a momentum-killer of gargantuan proportions. Virtually nothing of real note happened until the final quarter of the episode, and when things finally did get rolling, with the near-meltdown of the power plant, it still wasn’t very exciting. Even the one moment which should’ve been creepy – the shot of Carl’s body hanging from the ceiling of his living room – was ineffective, since the “Carl” at the plant was acting so mechanical and robotic that you already knew he had been replaced by a Terminator.
When Shirley Manson finally reared her head at the very last second to make a liquid-metal appearance that was even shorter than last week’s, it felt like a slap in the face to those who had just sat through the previous 50+ minutes waiting for her arrival. Better she should never have showed up at all.
